CHAPTER 26
Finn
Two weeks later…
The new boat sits in her slip, a big bright red bow attached at the gangplank leading on. I watch Marcus’s face the second he understands she’s his.
He stops dead on the dock, the wind off the Sound rattling the halyards into tinny music all up and down the marina. The gulls are working the breakwater, and Marcus just stands there with his good hand hanging at his side and his cast-covered wrist tucked against his stomach.
He looks at the boat, he looks at Josie who grins back at him, and then he looks at me.
“What is this?” he asks.
“She’s a forty-two-foot Grand Banks. Single diesel, low hours, surveyed clean. Galley’s been redone.” I keep my own voice easy because if I don’t, I’m going to lose it standing here on a dock in front of God, Josie and the gulls. “She’s yours, Marcus. Title’s in your name. It’s already done.”
He doesn’t move.
Josie’s hand is light at the small of my back, where she’s kept it for the last week every time she thinks I might be standing too long.
The walk down from the lot left me a little more winded than I’d cop to, and there’s a long, tender scar under my shirt, tracing the ribs on my left side where they opened me up to fix what the round tore loose.
It itches like hell as it continues to heal.
It pulls when I reach or twist, and I’ve learned to move in a careful, deliberate way.
Josie knows when I don’t. She doesn’t say anything now, though. She knows this moment isn’t hers.
“I can’t take a boat from you,” Marcus says.
“You can and you will.”
“Finn—”
“You pulled nine years with me. You sent every clean dollar you could to Lori and those kids, and you never once asked me for a thing beyond your cut.” I have to stop for a second.
“You went over the side of a burning boat two weeks ago and you grabbed a buoy and you held on in forty-eight-degree water until your body gave out. You lived, and I’m not going to stand here and let you start over with nothing.
So I bought you a boat. Run charters off her.
Run dive trips. Run sightseeing for tourists who want to see orcas.
” I pause and glance at Josie, who nods at me with a smile.
“Or make midnight runs down from Vancouver if you want to keep at it.” My voice has gone rough. “Take the boat, Marcus. She’s yours.”
His eyes moisten and he grabs me with his one good arm around my waist to pull me into a hug. He squeezes a little too hard and the surgical scar lights up like a struck match. I grab him back anyway and hold on, because there’s too much to say and no working language for any of it.
“Easy,” I manage against his shoulder. “Chest.”
“Shut up,” he says into my shoulder and laughs, and it’s wet.
When he lets go, he scrubs the back of his good hand across his eyes and pretends he didn’t.
I watch as he steps aboard like a man stepping into a church…
careful and reverent, and he runs his palm along the rail.
His eyes move along the clean lines of the helm and I watch two weeks of weight start to come off his shoulders one notch at a time.
Josie steps up beside him and slips her arm through his, and the two of them stand at the rail looking out at the water. I take a minute to watch them both, alive, here, in the gray Seattle light, and I think about how close I came to losing every single thing that matters in one night.
I carefully step aboard and follow Marcus down into the cockpit with one hand on the rail, taking the drop onto my good side, because a six-inch step down still jars the wound enough to catch my breath.
“She doesn’t have a name,” Marcus says.
“No. Figured that was yours to give.”
He’s quiet for a while. The halyards keep up their tinny music, and a ferry crosses the Sound out past the breakwater.
“I keep thinking about Connie,” he says finally.
They never found her. The Coast Guard worked the water for four days and pulled up miniscule bits of wreckage, but they never found her. She’s just gone. Out there. Part of the strait now.
“I’ve been so angry at her I can’t see straight,” Marcus says, quiet, his eyes on the water. “She sold us. All of us. She gave them you”—a glance at Josie—“and she gave them the run and she had to have known what those people do, what they were always going to do.”
I have nothing to say to that. I’ve been dealing with my own internal friction of grief and anger.
“The three of us nearly died and one of us did, and it’s her fault, and I hate her for it,” Marcus says, his jaw working.
“And then I think about a sixteen-year-old kid on a corner in the Central District that you pulled off the street, and I think about years of her sitting on this exact kind of dock with me at three in the morning waiting on a tide.” He shakes his head.
“And I can’t hold both of those at the same time, Finn.
I’ve tried for two weeks, and I can’t make them fit in the same chest.”
“I don’t think they’re supposed to fit,” I finally say. “I think you just carry them both and they stay heavy. I think that’s what it is when somebody’s family and they do something unforgivable. It doesn’t resolve. You just carry it.”
Josie’s hand finds mine, giving me a soft squeeze. Ironically, she’s already moved past the anger and has been focused on supporting me in the grief side of things.
Marcus looks at the blank transom of his new boat for a long time. “I’m going to name her the Modesto.”
I go still.
“Not because she earned it.” His voice is hard and certain and grieving all at once.
“Not because I forgive what she did, because I don’t, and I never will.
But she doesn’t have a grave, Finn. There’s no stone, there’s no plot, there’s no place anybody can go stand and say her name.
And she was family long before she became an enemy.
I’ll call it the Modesto in remembrance of the honest work she gave and the water she loved. ”
Josie’s eyes are wet. Mine aren’t dry either.
“The Modesto,” I say, testing it out on my tongue. “You know if you go legit, she’d have hated a boat that runs legal.”
A laugh punches out of Marcus, surprised, real. “God, she would’ve. She’d have been furious.”
“Pristine, clean, paperwork in order—”
“She’d have shredded it herself.”
And the three of us are laughing now, which turns into a heavy pressure in my lung that I struggle to breathe through. Fuck, I hate being incapacitated, but I don’t stop, because it’s the first time since the explosion that the laughing doesn’t feel like a betrayal of anything.
We stay a while. Marcus shows us the galley he’s already planning to use, the berth he’s going to put a real mattress in, the spot on the flybridge where he says he’s going to drink his coffee every morning for the rest of his life.
I’d offer to help him wrestle a mattress down to the berth or coil a line or do any single useful thing, but I’m not cleared to lift more than a few pounds for another month.
Marcus narrates his future. He talks about Lori bringing the kids up in the summer.
He talks about it out loud for the first time since I’ve known him, and I stand in the cockpit of the boat I bought him, and I let myself believe we’re all going to get one.
“We should let you take her out,” Josie says eventually, gentle. “We’ve got to get going, anyway.”
Marcus walks us to the gunwale. He hugs Josie first, careful with the cast, and says something low in her ear that makes her press her lips together and nod. Then he grips my good shoulder.
“We’ll keep in touch,” he says, and it isn’t a hope, it’s a fact, the way he says it. “Friday dinners. You and Josie. Down here or at your place or wherever. We don’t lose each other now. Not after this.”
“Not after this,” I agree.
He squeezes once and lets go, and Josie and I step onto the dock.
Hand in hand.
We’re almost to my Range Rover when a woman steps out from between two parked cars like she’s been waiting for exactly this moment.
Which she has.
“Mr. Marlowe.” Special Agent Valerie Royce is in a dark coat with her hands in the pockets and an expression I can’t read. “Ms. McAdams. Mind if I have a minute?”
Beside me I feel Josie go still, and I match her, and the easy afternoon goes taut as a line with a fish on it.
“Agent Royce,” Josie says, pleasant and even. “We were just leaving.”
“This won’t take long.” Royce’s eyes go past us, down the dock, to the boat. “That’s a beautiful vessel. Grand Banks?”
“Yup,” I say.
“Replacing the one you lost.” It’s not a question and there’s something underneath it, a pick at a seam.
She knows, and I’ve known for two weeks that she knows.
The cover we gave in our statements held with the Coast Guard and the FBI because Josie’s testimony is the spine of the whole federal case.
With her unwillingness to help if they looked at me too hard, Royce decided not to pull the thread.
“I’ll keep it simple,” Royce says. “Mikhail Sokolov’s attorney came to the US Attorney three days ago wanting to deal.”
The name feels like a fist to my chest. The man who came through my back wall and put a round in me and tried to kill the woman I love. The man whose people fired a rocket at my boat with two of my people aboard and the reason Connie now lives in a watery grave.
“What kind of deal?” Josie asks.